The goal of our research was to study how teams collaborate during an online hackathon and how the design of an event can potentially affect their collaboration. It is thus reasonable to conduct a multiple-case study [1]} because it allows us to study the novel phenomenon of collaboration during online hackathons in the context it occurs and draw insights about “how" it takes place [2]}. There are however inherent limitations related to this particular research design. We conducted a total of 27 interviews across 10 teams that participated in 4 hackathons that took place over a span of six months across two continents. Despite making a deliberate selection of hackathons that were organized around different themes, goals and sizes and randomly selecting teams our findings cannot be generalized beyond our study context. Studying different teams that participated in different events organized with different goals might yield different results. Moreover, we opted for interviews as our main source of information. The perceptions of participants might however affect their report of the event. In order to address this limitation, we conducted the interviews close to the event itself to ensure that the participants would remember most details about the event and their collaboration as a team. We also interviewed at least two members of each team we studied to avoid solely focusing on a single perspective thus inducing bias. Another potential source of bias stems from the fact that some interviews were conducted in Portuguese and had to be translated to English for analysis. To mitigate this bias we ensured that two Portuguese native speakers with excellent command of the English language handled the translation collaboratively. Furthermore, the analysis was conducted by a team of researchers. Despite collaborating during the entire analysis procedure, there is the possibility that different researchers with different expertise and backgrounds might have interpreted certain findings differently. We thus abstained from making causal claims instead providing a rich description of the perceptions of participants based on which we discuss how teams collaborated and how they perceived the event design to affect their collaboration. We hope to see more research on collaboration in online hackathons in the future to complement our findings.
